After every training course, Huntswood measures how well the message got across. Just like everything else in business, training must be measured for you to assess your return on investment. Too often it’s treated like a check-box exercise and forgotten after completed – that’s a waste of your human resources development budget. Bring your usual business savvy to the way you train your employees – measure your success.
In terms of training success, you’ll want to measure this within three months. This will help you assess if a) the training material was understood, b) if it needs to be repeated, and c) if it has stayed with the employees. We call this a “pulse check” here at Huntswood.
Phil Festa, Huntswood’s Director of Learning and Development, provides another reason to do a pulse check: “As with all business strategies, it’s important to measure the outcomes of your efforts. This doesn’t change because we are dealing with people.”
You’ll also want to check ‘learning’ annually. This will cover the whole company, not just those who were trained. Why? Hopefully the trained employees are sharing their knowledge. Hopefully training materials and topics, such as Treating Customers Fairly, have become ingrained in your corporate culture, courtesy of the training. In order to measure this, ask questions focusing on the training material in relation to the company, the department, and immediate supervisors.
The measurements don’t need to be a long and involved process. Yes, a face-to-face interview with each employee would likely paint a very vivid and useful picture of the state of the company and the level of internalisation the training has reached, but it would also be extremely time consuming. Save yourself the time and effort by using a standard survey. You can use any number of survey clients. You are likely to be already using one for your CRM – just turn it around and point it internally instead of externally.
But just because you are asking survey questions, do not limit your employees to simple check-box responses. Ask qualitative questions, such as “Where do you apply the training?” or “Where do you think the training would be more useful?” Give your employees a chance to comment and add their own insights. They are on the front line, employing the training you paid for them to receive. They’ll know better than anyone if they are using it or not, or where they could do with more training.
Take a look at some of our scenario-based training videos below for a taster of the way we work.
